Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday December 02, 2009 @09:09PM
from the piece-of-your-mind dept.

kdawson writes "A year after voting unanimously to open 'white space' frequencies for unlicensed use, the FCC has now issued a public notice seeking database proposals (PDF). Howard Feld explains in his blog posting: 'At last! We can get moving on this again, and hopefully move forward on the most promising "disruptive" technology currently in the hopper. And move we are, in a very peculiar fashion. Rather than resolve the outstanding questions about how the database provider will collect money, operate the database, or whether the database will be exclusive or non-exclusive, the Public Notice asks would-be database managers to submit proposals that would cover these issues. ... I label this approach "good, but weird."'"

like the ones they have in Australia, UHF does not get the DX/Skip interference like 27MHz does, when I want to talk locally i dont want dozens of people from all over the USA or all over the world interrupting our conversation just to say "hi, where are you?, what kind of radio do you have?" etc...etc... it gets old and annoying after a while

It makes perfect sense. They have no idea how to do it or the answers to those questions, so they are asking for current database experts to propose a solution.
That is opposed to arguing about whatever option they happen to chose arbitrarily until nothing gets done.

I've read the proposal twice. They don't describe what they want to store at all. And I don't see a reference to another document either. How can anyone make an informed proposal without knowing anything about the data!!

Clearly you've never worked for a consultancy. What you need is a few dozen current buzzwords/phrases - like Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Web 2.0 - and a few weasel words/phrases - like Synergy (a must have in any proposal!), Then you need to proove you can throw 300 people at the problem if needed (and you will find a way to justify it!). Never mind that some dork with a PostGres database and a few scripts (or Access 2007 database if you're a Microsoftie) can probably do what they need. If they can't work out what they need it's a business opportunity.